Good news – the upgraded brewery works a treat and the inaugural brew went very well indeed.

We collected 50L split across two fermenting buckets at the anticipated starting gravity of 1.043. It should ferment out at around 1.012 and deliver a deep brown 4% brew with a fat slice of bitterness and a pleasing hop kick. The blend of malts is intended to provide a complexity that waves goodbye to the Summer and it’s more direct pale ales. But we’ve also loaded plenty of pungent hops at the start of the boil to keep things interesting for the hopheads.

We’re pleased to say there were no problems during the brew. The new HLT is probably a little small in volume, but being able to fill it with a hose and heat liquor in situ was still so much easier and safer than hefting hot liquids around. The big mashtun has been a fixture in the Boxshed for a while now and did its job very well as always, maintaining a constant temperature over 90 minutes with ease. The real star was the new boiler, which was our biggest unknown quantity and worry beforehand. The two large immersion heater elements brought 65 litres of sweet wort to the boil very quickly, and a constant rolling boil could be maintained by using either one of the elements on its own. Special mention must go to the new hopstopper created by fellow enthusiast Garth, which coped admirably with several ounces of pellets without any clogging.

Anyway, enough words, here are the pictures already…

This is the basic setup at the Boxshed for now – 50L brewlengths, primarily built in stainless steel with some plastic and copper here and there. It isn’t finished , but we’re intending to stay gravity and avoid electric pumps. The new chrome staging is fantastic, and very sturdy

The old Burco boiler has been cut up and adapted into an HLT with a sight tube and large bore lever tap. One day this will go altogether in favour of another 70L homemade heated vessel, but this is a step up from an insulated tub. The chiller also needs remaking and lengthening very soon

The mashtun has been a feature for a while now and works just great. The hose attachment fits through the staging and increases draw

The new 70L boiler features two large immersion heater elements, doubles brew length and rolls along just great. That big mouse-proof bin holds pale malt. Those sprays contain sanitiser

Here’s that bin again. It holds a 25Kg sack of organic marris otter, but there are plenty of other speciality grains knocking around too, mainly from Barley Bottom. Hops and yeasts are in a nearby freezer

Lots of great malts here, including 82% pale malt and four other speciality malts

Quite a loose mash began at around 70c in the preheated tun

Mash, mash, mash…

Mash, mash, mash…

Quick, quick, lock in that heat! We need around 65c for 90 minutes!

Phew, that’s about perfect

This recipe features a dash of sugar, for a change, to lift and thin it a little. This is just standard brewers’ glucose

We imported these pellet hops from The Bruhaus (thebruhaus.com) in New York

First runnings and returns. Lots of these taken from the mash run-off and two further batches

The first sweet wort ever to hit the new boiler. Takes some volume to cover both those elements…

Whoosh – the siphon effect of the chrome hose is excellent. Hope it isn’t too tricky to clean up

Mash drained very nicely

Heating up water for the batch sparging. This staging proved quite handy for just resting stuff on. Like a thermometer, or a nice cold pint, for instance

This is the final batch about to fill up the boiler to 66 litres-ish. Those hops are getting a bit nervous…

Spent malt following one drain and two large equal volume batches

Sugar in. Not an ingredient we usually use at the Boxshed, but it’s all part of the master plan for this brew

Plenty of hops in for the full boil. It looks such a small amount in pellet form, but would be a very large bag of flowers

The two elements bring the wort to a boil rapidly. A pint of BHJ looks on sulkily

Boom, rolling boil. One element held this quite nicely

Fifteen minutes before the end of the 90 minute boil, we threw in two Protofloc auxiliary finings tablets (from BB). That lid is a foot or so off the top of the boiler and is letting all the steam flow, but is also stopping drips from above

With the heat now off, it was time to throw in the steeping hops

Chilling. This took ages and underlined the need for us to upgrade our chiller as soon as possible

Ah, the classic paddle/seive shot. Into the fermenter it goes. Hurrah!

The brew comes out of the new boiler with some impetus

To make sure the wort qualities didn’t vary too much between fermenters, we filled them in turn

Around 12g of rehydrated yeast went in to each FV halfway through filling. No budget for liquid yeasts this time – it all went on hops and grain!

Two full fermenters each containing 25L of aerated, paddled bitter wort

All happy indoors at 20c, each fermenter contains 25L at 1.043, with a target of around 1.012 and an ABV of approx. 4%

It’s been a heckuver long time since my last post, and even longer since our last brewday. Our kegs are all in use (I’m still drinking Landlubber!) and there’s been no need or capacity for another brew to keep beer levels up.

Nevertheless, we’ve put some of the time to good use, and have finally expanded the brew length of the Boxshed Brewery by creating a boiler/copper with twice the volume of the old boiler! Great stuff.

The mashtun I made last year was built with the extended brew length in mind so will fit perfectly into the new setup. The old boiler, now complete with sight tube, will make a perfect HLT. All that was then required was a big pot to convert into a boiler, and now that’s complete too.

I remembered to take a few photos during the build. Sadly I missed several stages and most of the pictures aren’t great, but hey, I’m uploading them all anyway as a handy record (and because I’ll never move on with this blog otherwise!)

Really can’t wait to use this new vessel in anger – it looks so cool compared to the old one!

I’ll post future updates if I remember any more details of the build, but for now photos and captions will have to do the job:

I waited an age to get a good sized pot for the right price and in the end bought from homebrewers’ fave, Nordic Optical, and had this 70L one with lid shipped from Germany. Plumbing parts and stainless elements came from BES plumbing. All sight tube stuff came from craftbrewer Garth

It’s hard to tell in a photo, but these pots really do look massive. Making the first cut into the perfect mirror finish is a bit of a worry. All I can say is, get some decent tools, and measure and level check plenty of times

This isn’t intended as a guide on how to make one of these things. Look on JBK or The Homebrew Forum and you’ll get see real guides from proper skilled handymen. I made crude marks with marker pens and centre punches and went for it 🙂

I used a cordless drill with a rotation of charged batteries to keeo power at its optimum. Buildbase kindly sold me a set of Bosch Cobalt Bi-metal holesaws for half price. Brilliant. First step, fitting the smashing three-piece stainless ball valve tap.

Centre punch. Arbour. 25mm holesaw. It’s pretty much an identical process to cutting the sight tube holes on the HLT. I didn’t take any photos of cutting the hole, basically

Bit of a different beast for the two elements. 64mm holesaws are a bit unwieldly

I cocked it up, basically. The smaller saws went through like butter, but the larger ones, together with the curveture of the pot, made cutting these holes a nightmare

The saws didn’t cut through. I work hardened the cutting area by trying too hard. I got angry and sweary

Ug. I wasn’t very happy at this point and didn’t know how to fix it

As you can see I destroyed quite an expensive saw. The teeth flattened out and it basically caught on fire

Cut off saws (lots of them) were used to cut out the holes freehand. They looked dreadful. I took off the burrs and tidied up the shiz with a polishing thingy

Ahem, and then it was fine! Actually, it took bloody ages of painstaking grinding, but eventually the elements were in and they looked ace. Doncha think?

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that tightening these elements with an element spanner and a cobra strap wrench is anything other than hellish. Do anything that requires skin on your knuckles before you start

The backs of the elements are huge

Sight tube elbowy bits (thanks Garth)

Nothing’s easy. Evene these things were a nightmare to tighten without killing them

This is what the back of those elements looks like with the shrouds. Ignore the warning label. Electricity mixes excellently with water

These thermostat probe bits aren’t needed and prevent a rolling boil. Pull them out and set them aside in case you need some cyberpunk chopsticks

Okay, so this is what you’re left with. The earth and neutral are pretty straightforward, but the live needs connecting with a piece of heat resistant electrical block. Use ceramic, or 30A rated chocolate block only

Um. Those elements again.

…

And here’s the finished boiler. After a test boil I added some silcone gasket to seal all the various threads. The next test boil went really well

I used high temperature cable for one element and even higher tolerance for the other, which is a longer run so that I can use seperate power sockets. Two elements get to the boil quickly, and one is enough to keep it rolling. Jobs a good ‘un – can’t wait to fit a hopstopper and use it anger!

Just a short iPhone post after a very tricky and tiring evening of stainless steel brewfacturing!

Tonight I began cutting holes in the 70L pot as the first stage of building the Boxshed’s new boiler. Sadly, although I had a lot of fun making a big mess with power tools, I had a bit of trouble burning out the largest holesaw while making new homes for the elements. Oh dear. Lots, lots more on this project another day though!

To make myself feel better after the boiler cock-up, I fitted a sight tube (cheers again Garth) to our old boiler, which will soon become the HLT. Here it is. Please ignore the big ding around the thermostat – it was there when I acquired the Burco as a ‘graded’ product. I’m also adding a sight tube to the new boiler, hopefully, so I’ll explain what happened in more depth in a future post.

To the layman it’s just a big cooking pot and a load of plumbing spares. But this little lot could soon become an extremely exciting new addition to the Boxshed Brewery. Not only will it allow us to boil 50L+ brewlengths sufficient to fill proper pub kegs, it will also free up the old 32L stainless boiler to become a proper HLT.

So far the brewpot (thanks Nadine), immersion elements, stainless ball valve and sight tube bits (thanks Garth) have all arrived here in a postage dripfeed, but the 64mm/20mm holesaws have yet to arrive (yeah, cheers Tool Shop Direct). The whole project will take a while to complete as time and money allows (need a new tiered stand thingy too), and we’re going to need someone to help out with the mains leccy, but it’s all VERY shiny and VERY exciting nevertheless. Woohoo!

Here’s a rapid snap. It’s quite hard to tell in this photo, because the sheer shine of the thing is obliterating the bottom half of the vessel in the sunlight, but this new copper is mahoosive. It’s half a metre in all dimensions. To give you an idea, it happily covers all four hobs if you sit it on an electric cooker. Probably not such a bad idea actually… …just kidding!

The new boiler equipment is so shiny you need to wear shades even to walk into the same room

This quirky thing of mystery just arrived on my desk direct from sunny Portugal. I am planning great things for its future!

It’s a one-piece galvanised steel watering can rose with a stepped spout in case you’re wondering. I’m umm-ing and ah-ing over several possible ways to use it, some of which are obvious and dull, but others of which are quite reckless and interesting…

Finally I managed to find the time and gather the equipment to put together a shiny new stainless steel mashtun, and I’m very pleased with the results (although the first brew with the new beast will be the real proof of my amateurish construction skills.)

I bought a 50L stainless steel Thermobox from a German company called Nordic Optical around six months ago, since when it has been sitting about in a carboard box looking ominous and neglected. A Thermobox is a double-walled stainless steel vat with styrofoam insulated walls and a latch-locked lid. They are designed to carry hot food for function caterers, but can be (and have been) turned into fantastic mashtuns suitable for batch or fly-sparging just by adding a tap of some sort and a grain filtering device. My problem was to work out how to practically and affordably build a straining manifold (or false bottom) and fix a tap on to the thin twin walls.

I put the project off for some time not only because I needed the money to buy decent tools (especially holesaws) capable of cutting stainless efficiently, but also because I didn’t really know how to use the correct plumbing components and get the thing done without wrecking a valuable stainless tub. As it turned out, all I needed to do was buy some quality kit, digest a huge amount of valuable advice from homebrewers more practically minded than myself on JBK and latterly The HomeBrew Forum, then get a day off work and bite the bullet. Fortunately all went well.

I’ve attached a dozen or so photos of the process below which should be self explanatory. I began by making a mashtun manifold out of 15mm copper pipe and fittings. This is a tried and tested method of extracting the sugary wort from the mash and one that is still generally favoured over false bottoms among the UK brewing community, although I wouldn’t discount buying a US stainless FB one day if I’m lucky enough to get over there. I started cutting slots with a hacksaw and found it a complete nightmare, so after some advice I began using a Dremel 300 with cut-off wheels to cut as many slots halfway through the pipe structure as possible. The standard wheels managed about 15 cuts each before grinding down to nothing and shattering across the room, but I had more luck with the heavy duty versions (still burnt through about eight of these though!) Once done I had a nice size manifold with a lot of cuts. I realised I was maximising drainage while increasing deadspace with the extent of these cuts, but figured it would amount to no more than two litres which I would compensate for in future brewdays.

Cutting the actual Thermobox had been my biggest worry. Forums abound with tales of holesaws perishing on stainless walls and slippages wrecking that all important shiny surface. I bought the best quality holesaws I could source from a great traditional hardware store – Partridge’s of Hadleigh, Suffolk. The Bahco Bi-Metal Sandflex holesaws and arbours weren’t cheap but looked the part. Following the lead of other brewfacturers on the forums mentioned, I made a punchhole and then cut a 25mm hole in the outer skin as low down as I could to meet the internal floor. I made sure the arbour pilot drill pierced the inner wall so that I could then easily line up and cut a 22mm hole in the internal skin. So far, so good – the saws went through the steel like butter.

The next step was to fit the tap. I used the Dremel to take of any slight burrs then tried fitting the assembly. Essentially I was using a standard 15mm ball valve lever tap, a 15mm female-to female socket piece, a nylon/rubber washer and a standard 15mm tank connecter. The idea was to emulate a forum idea to leave the lip of the socket connecter outside in order to add strength to the tap connection, while its 25mm length body would span the void between the thin stainless walls and tighten to the tank connecter. In practice I had to Dremel off the lip ridge on one end of the socket connecter as well as two ridges on its body before squeezing it into the 25mm hole and fitting it tightly on to the tap (using synthetic lubricant) and into the outside hole. In order to allow the tank connecter to tighten properly from the inside, I then had to reduce its length by about 15mm and replace the washer before lubing up the thread and tightening until the walls pinched. It all looked great.

With the tap fitted I turned to the manifold. I had left a t-piece positioned at one end of the manifold grid and then attached this directly to the aperture on the back of the tank connecter with a piece of carefully bent 15mm copper pipe. The whole assembly not only comes apart for cleaning, it also pivots vertically around the t-piece, which is handy for removing moisture before storage. And that’s it really – it all looks the part. I have further plans to install a unique permanent sparging device into the lid of the tun so I can fly sparge without unlocking the tun at all, but more of that another day! Here are the pics.

Tools and other kit ready to go

Punched pilot hole for large saw and arbour

Larger hole done – phew – arbour through to inner skin

Took off the burrs and tidied up with Dremel

Needed to grind off one lip and ridges on socket to push into outer hole

Tap with socket fitted and downpipe. Tank connecter shortened.

Mashtun manifold was labour of love. A billion deep cuts. Deadspace no doubt.

I’ve had a big project in mind for some time to upgrade various bits of my brewing kit to higher capacity stainless steel. I’m not looking for anything electronic or flash at this stage, but I do want to make cleaning easier and brewdays less messy by using vessels with a little more headroom. The first vessel I’m looking to upgrade is my mashtun, but the others will follow as and when – probably HLT next, then the boiler when I can afford to shop about a bit. The refurb will also give me the excuse I need to re-organise the staging that holds my vessels and make the whole area a bit more elegant and shiny.

The mashtun I’m looking to make will be a conversion of a 50L thermobox – one of two tubs I shipped over from Germany about six months ago. I’ll be looking to drill the steel walls for a lever tap ball valve, and maybe add a sparging system to the lid, but to start off with I’ve begun knocking up a mashtun manifold to filter the grain bed. I’ve watched dozens of people make these on brewing forums, especially JBK, and finally I’ve started making one of my own. I chose 15mm copper pipe and fittings, rather than 22mm, to minimise dead ton space, and an HSS hacksaw. Here it is so far. Not looking forward to hacksawing a hundred little cuts in it though!